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The dawning awareness of your own mortality is a common theme in young adult fiction, often paired with a sexual awakening. You get both here, but mostly, it's the death.

There's been a plague of books and shows about plagues lately. This one from 1977 distinguishes itself by depicting a plague of premature ageing. Suddenly the inevitable end comes hurtling towards the whole human race at super speed, and even toddlers suddenly become gnarled, wrinkled and senile, then die quietly in their sleep.

YA fiction became bolder and more explicit about sex and death around the time this book was written, and there's plenty of shocking confrontation here to have it banned by squeamish or rabidly zealous US school boards. The very bits they would no doubt object to are the best parts of this book.

John Christopher was a friend of John Wyndham. The work of the triffids creator was famously (and unfairly in my opinion) smeared as "cosy catastrophes" by Brian Aldiss. 'Empty World', might qualify for Aldiss' epithet, if it weren't for the corpse-laden first half of this little novel. The second half changes gears and becomes a sort of bisexual love triangle and morality play. The ending is satisfying, but the first half of the book is the best. The grieving protagonist is numbed by his tragedy, giving the author an opportunity to serve us up some meaty existential detachment and alienation.

After a day's reflection I have removed a star because of dated sex and gender portrayals. Mainly, it is unacceptable for a male character to forcibly kiss a girl to resolve an argument, it is sexual assault. In the story it turns out it was what she wanted but didn't express it. Also the male character didn't know this, he just kissed her without consent. Female readers will recognise this garbage. In real life, a boy having an argument with a girl does not mean he should kiss her without her agreement, this only happens in the warped imagination of boys trained to believe these rapey fictions.

I've read a few of John Christopher's books and he is not too good with inclusiveness. I'll go easy on him here because he has at least included two interesting female characters, and it is an isolated incident. The author should have paid closer attention to his buddy John Wyndham, who created powerful female characters, inspired by his real-life partner.

In my recent re-reading of "The Chocolate War" by Robert Cormier, I found the story completely ruined by the ridiculous objectification of the female characters who are remote or peripheral. It's a shame because it was a groundbreaking book in so many other ways. Now I can't recommend it to young readers. I wouldn't go so far with John Christopher's books, but I think any boys reading them would benefit from some guidance about the dated attitudes presented in books like this.

This book does a superb job at corralling the unruly herd of musical creators who stampeded through the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was MY time. I was 16 in 1979, excited by punk, enamoured with the new music which was emerging.

Each individual artist from this time is unique, they include Public Image Ltd on one end of the scale, and the Thompson Twins at the other. The artists could be abrasive and uncompromising, or commercial and artistically slight, but Reynolds deftly identifies a common thread that links them all. What is that thread? It's hard to pin down, but I think the title gives the best indication. In 1976 the original punks smashed down the walls that commercialised popular culture had built up over the preceding two decades. Postpunk was about the possibilities created once we could venture forth beyond those walls.

Towards the end of the book Reynolds makes some comparisons with the preceding cultural breakout of the 1960s. There's a sense that the first version was messed up, and the punks were trying to get it right this time. I'm reminded of the key line in a 60s touchstone, the film 'Easy Rider': "we blew it".

Perhaps the ambitions of the punks and those who followed were not as lofty as their older brothers and sisters. Perhaps Peter Fonda's chopper-riding character was being a bit harsh on his 60s travellers. But after reading this great book, I think we can feel pretty good about our second attempt. We didn't blow it, whatever "it" was.

Philosophy is bunk. I've gleaned that philosophers in the course of history have felt the need to concoct a cosmology. Over the centuries the great discoveries of science have rendered those earlier confections meaningless, yet they linger. If all the great thinkers of classical antiquity had access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and EInstein, they would have saved a lot of time and not bothered with their speculations about the will of the gods in creating life and matter and all the rest.

Here we have Olaf Stapledon who does indeed have access to the insights of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, come up with a load of tedious waffle trying to describe god. Stapledon thinly disguises his theological nonsense as a journey through space and time. It gets worse and worse as the book goes on as he loses interest in the disguise . Stapledon shouldn't have bothered to write it, and I don't think you should bother to read it.

For me, a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, continuing to push the themes of race, gender, nuclear armageddon, sex and biology. The alien-human hybrid Jodahs is the narrator. It - for that is its pronoun - is another Christ figure, like Akin in the previous novel. But this time the name suggests Judas, and there is frequently a suggestion that a putative mediator could turn out to be a betrayer.

One thing I like about Butler is how she goes to extremes. In this case the most sexually desirable creatures left on planet earth are a community of nuclear mutants afflicted with debilitating degenerative conditions and horrible skin diseases. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!

In her other novels (e.g. the Patternist series) she portrays the worst traits of human debauchery and murder, just to make it hard to pick a side - hegemonising aliens or violent human psycho-killers. Here I found I had sympathy for her protagonist Jodahs, but at the same time the ooloi are an alien species with a special gland that excretes the ultimate date-rape drug. One whiff and you can't help falling in love with that tentacled freak from space. Consent and free will, it seems, are more complicated in the post-nuclear alien contact phase of humanity.

But then, Jodahs doesn't have any choice in the matter either, it has to find human mates or descend into a suicidal metamorphosis where it devolves into a mindless slug and finally dissolves itself in the post-nuclear swamp.

Much as this is a compelling story with some appealing concepts, Butler's futures are not aspirational.

In typical Butler style, the second book in this series moves on to the next generation. Lilith, the human collaborator with the alien saviour-colonisers, fades into the background, making way for her half alien son Akin. He's not portrayed as a mythical Christ-figure, his motivations are too deeply biological and personal for that. But he is a potential saviour for the human holdouts who would rather die out than interbreed with the hegemonising Oankali.

There's a perfect balance here. The Oankali have rescued the tiny remnant of humanity which survived the nuclear holocaust, and they treat their new friends with love that goes all the way into the sexual realm and way beyond what we thought was possible with our limited capacity for fleshy pleasures. On the other hand they dictate that humanity can only survive as an interbred hybrid with themselves. Fuck with us and have half-alien babies, or remain sterile and go extinct. Benevolence and dictatorship never co-existed with such intensity.

The rebellious humans would appear to be completely within their rights to resist, but the Oankali have determined with absolute certainty that they will only end up destroying themselves all over again, so there's no future for them. The humans are already murderous arseholes, kind of proving the point.

Akin knows that too, but he can't help himself. He wants to save humanity even if it's doomed to failure.

As usual with Butler, the moral and social dilemmas of her fiction are laced with passion and horror, and the result is a super intense portrayal of love, life, sex and death. There are no easy answers, no happy-ever-after, but the messy, ambiguous reality gives very satisfying HARD answers, and little bits of happiness along the way.

Another essential novel from a master of the genre.

You start with the origins of a post-human tele-kinetic society, jumping forwards through its history in the second book, interrupted in the third by the arrival of a super-evolved inerstellar contagion which turns those it infects into a new and virulent species intent on infecting and converting all life it encounters. The last book is set in the far future as the two groups - alien hybrids and post-humans - struggle for supremacy.

As with all of Butler's work, I was acutely aware of her position as a pioneer, the first black woman to break through in a genre dominated by white men. For me she is a teacher as well as a storyteller. But her stories are confronting. There is murder, there is slavery, there is patriarchy, and these disturbing traits are not defeated in a feelgood happy-ever-after resolution. That is not the reality of a black woman in America in the 60s and 70s. The strength of Butler's work is in how her own reality is revealed in these very far-out science fiction and fantasy stories. They are set on earth, in part contemporaneous with our own history, but the real world is hardly mentioned, as the human society we know becomes a lesser species compared to the entities which replace it. But always I feel the author's presence, her voice telling a story which her white male contemporaries could never come up with.

You could read the "Patternist" books in the order in which Butler wrote them, but in this collection, the four novels are presented in chronological order based on the events described. It is at times uncomfortable reading, but compelling throughout.

Two stories in this book are about humans being dominated by nightmarish aliens. After reading Butler's time travel and slavery novel "Kindred", and knowing what a pioneer she was as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, it's hard to miss the influence her real life had on her fiction.

But there's a tremendous compassion and hope for reconciliation in her stories. Anger and outrage are built into the premise of a Butler story, but the future always contains love and optimism... more than the domineering aliens seem to deserve. Her stories have such clarity and simplicity, and I feel like I know her personally, or I WANT to know her, even as she's creating one her uniquely bizarre science fiction scenarios. Everything I've read by her makes me feel her loss. 58 is too young.

I take half a star off only because I thought the story "Near of Kin" was distasteful. Maybe you need to have a different relationship with the Christian bible to get it, but I think it was a rare failure. It's probably the least significant of the stories in this little collection, and others refloated the book as I read on.